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Jazz photography has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Photographs of musicians are popular with enthusiasts, while historians and critics are keen to incorporate photographs as illustrations. Yet there has been little interrogation of these photographs and it is noticeable that what has become known as the jazz photography 'tradition' is dominated by a small number of well-known photographers and 'iconic' images.
Many photographers, including African American photojournalists, studio photographers, early twentieth-century émigrés, the Jewish exiles of the 1930s and vernacular snapshots are frequently overlooked. Drawing on ideas from contemporary photographic theory supported by extensive original archival research, Sight Readings is a thorough exploration of twentieth century jazz photography, and it includes discussions of jazz as a visual subject, its attraction to different types of photographers and offers analysis of why and how they approached the subject in the way they did.
One of the remarkable things about this book is its movement back and forth between detailed archive research, the empirical documentation of photographers, their techniques, working practices, equipment etc., and cultural theory, the sophisticated discussion of aesthetics, cultural sociology, the politics of identity, etc. The result is both a fine scholarly achievement and an engaging labour of love.
'A mixture of scientific history of photography and insight into a profession in the jazz world that we seldom think about. It is readable and deep at the same time. It can be assigned to the field of "new jazz studies", which have recognized that interdisciplinary views of music and its environment contribute to knowledge about the music itself. In doing so, Ainsworth succeeds in explaining different approaches, in drawing attention to perspectives and in bringing us closer to what we don't see. [...] Alan John Ainsworth's Sight Readings thus supplements every photo book collection with a documentation of what actually happens when a photographer photographs musicians, how photos influence the perception of jazz history and how they have formed our view of jazz.'
Contents
Foreword by Darius Brubeck
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Approaching jazz photography
Chapter 1: Jazz photography and photographers 1900-1960
Chapter 2: Jazz writing and the photographic image
Chapter 3: The Jazz image as document
Chapter 4: Expression in the jazz image
Chapter 5: The Play of Gestures: Jazz in the Studio
Chapter 6: Document and realism: early African American jazz photography
Chapter 7: Expressive realism in African American photography
Chapter 8: Authenticity and art: ‘New generation’ white photography
Chapter 9: Interrogating jazz: exiles and Jewish photography
Chapter 10: Looking forward, looking back: Jazz photography after 1960
Conclusion: Herb Snitzer, Pops (1960)
Appendix: Photographic agency and jazz photography
Bibliography
Index